Neal Harris
Long before I encountered the concept of social pathology I had been intuitively fascinated by ’deeper’, more ’foundational’ social critiques. In my teenage years, as a socialist from a workingclass family, society simply seemed ’crazy’ or ’illogical’ to me. I would read about the grotesque inequalities of wealth, the self-indulgent fancies of billionaires, man-made global warming, the continued presence of racial and gender inequalities, neo-colonial wars, even the persistence of the House of Lords ... to my unschooled mind, the best word to describe this was ’bonkers’. So, as a precocious (at times insufferable) college student, I would puzzle over Rousseau and Nietzsche, not always understanding it, but feeling there was ’something’ there which was ’weightier’ than the prescribed liberal readings of my textbooks. During my undergraduate degree I became fascinated by Hegel and Adorno for similar reasons, and with comparable semicomprehension. It was only during my Master’s, that these thoughts developed any clear form, and I slowly became aware that there was a rich theoretical literature on the explicit commonality across these authors: that of ’social pathology’
